And it it obviously is deeply personal and thats what well spend time on. It does touch on larger issues about aspects of immigration in America Today and americas heritage. I hope well get to that as well. But lets begin at the beginning, which, of course, is the fact that you are from mexico. You were born in mexico and spent your Early Childhood years there. But its interesting that your childhood and how you grew up isnt really the stereo type. That youre not from an impoverished background, youre not from a small isolated village. Could you talk to our audience about your home, your family, the circumstances of your upbringing . Yeah, thank you so much for having me and im excited to have this conversation. I grew up in mexico and my family, theyre all entrepreneurs and they worked really, really hard to be able to provide my siblings and i a better life and even when i was in mexico, i was really surrounded by a really large support system because my family is really close, not just emotionally close, but we literally live within walking distance from each other. But my childhood in mexico is was very different from peoples minds what they grow up. What a lot of tourists experience in mexico and see kids selling gum on the side of the road and that wasnt my experience because my parents worked so hard and my grandparents worked so hard to make sure that that wasnt my experience. So i group up in mexico from a middle income family. I used to take piano lessons and karate lessons and every kind of lesson that was available in my small hometown, but that also came with sacrifice and the biggest sacrifice that my parents were making in order for me to have that kind of life was that we werent together. My parents lived in the u. S. And i lived in mexico and we would only see each other every few months or i would come to the u. S. And visit them in the summers. Well, tell us more about that, those circumstances of your parents deciding to come to the u. S. And to live apart from their children. What how did you experience that as a child . What was that . Were you aware that that was somewhat unusual . How did it feel . Yeah, i was definitely aware that it was unusual because i one, i missed my parents and two, i could see parents coming with their children to school, to parentteacher conferences, to different mothers day events and my parents werent there all the time. And they, just like i said, they wanted us to have a better life so when they i was three years old they used to import sterling silver in the u. S. And sell it at trade shoes across the country and go back and forth as part of their business, but, you know, as a little girl, as a child not having your parents with you and only seeing them every few months, first of all, you feel like theres a little bit of strangers to you. When i would see my parents, they would come bearing lots of presents and when i came to visit them in the u. S. , we were it was Summer Vacation so it was a very different experience than having parents who are with you every single dayment so, it was and for me, it was also a lonely experience because as close as my family was, my siblings, my two older sisters are five and ten years older than me. So it was very difficult being so alone at that early age and ultimately thats why my parents decided to bring me to live with them. They had hit some hard Financial Times and were unable to go visit mexico as much and be with me as much and because i was so young, they realized that thats not the best way to raise a child so thats when they decided to bring me to live with them permanently in the u. S. And thats where thats where my life completely, completely changed. Host well, thats a very important and very moving part of the book because it is also accompanied by the fact that you were the youngest child in the family and so you really were a family favorite, in fact, i love the place where you say that you were a bit of a brat as a youngster because you just had so much you were very gregarious and you loved to be a performer and so forth. And then what happens . Your mother has another child and i believe youre nine years old and suddenly you have a younger brother and its a little bit of a different dynamic, isnt it . Yeah, i mean, my my little brother and i have a great relationship now, but i think when he when i found out that my mom was pregnant with my little brother in mexico we have a saying when youre the favorite child you stayed on the donkey and that comes from the bible of mary sitting on the donkey as they were walking through the desert to bethlehem. So my whole family would tease me about kicking me off the donkey and my little brother would have that place. Not only that, but in my mind as a 10yearold girl, this baby was going to not only take my parents love from me, but he would get he or she i didnt know at the time it would be a boy, but they would get to live with my parents in america and i found out he was a boy and things getting worse in my 10yearold mind because its a really big deal to have a male baby in my culture and in mexican families. So, that was a lot to take in as a little girl and that coupled with the fact that my sisters were older, they were now going to college and high school in a different city. Before i at least had my sisters with me and all of a sudden, my mom was having a new baby, my sisters were going to live in different city, so then i felt not just abandoned by my parents, but now by my sisters, too. And that was that was a lot for me to handle at that early age. Host well, so, in the middle of all of that Emotional Turmoil and what, as you say a 10yearold mind, its very difficult to understand these things, your parents decide that in fact you should come to the United States and you do, which under these circumstances, if someone were writing a fairy tale, it would be okay, and they lived happily ever after, but we all know that reality is different and you describe a reality then that is certainly different. Tell us about that reality of coming to the United States and then being here rather than with your family, your larger family. Guest so i didnt really didnt know i was coming to live here. When i came to visit that summer, i thought it was just like any other summer when i came to visit my parents and then would go back to mexico once the school year started. But that summer i never went back and it was a really difficult transition for me because, i think, a lot of people can relate to the fact that when youre a kid, one of the most scary things to do is to go to a new school and make new friends and i had to do that and learn a new language and all of a sudden learn how to have parents, who were with me all the time. And i also had, in my mind, america was this sort of fairy tale in a way, was this magical place that i experienced through my Summer Vacations of going to six flags and sea world and what i saw on television. So, there were a couple of shows that were dubbed in spanish i walked in mexico, dennis the menace, Beverly Hills 90210 and everybody in those shows was rich and white and once i moved to san antonio, i realized there were people who looked like me that were american. And living here my experience was difference because also my parents financial situation had changed so much and so drastically. So, even things that i had access to before, such as all the lessons that i mentioned, we couldnt afford that anymore. And it was very difficult to experience that and to see my parents working so hard, but at the same time it was really eyeopening to me because before that, i never realized just how hard and just how much my parents were sacrificing in order for me to have the life that i had, but being here, i could see it firsthand and i could see just how much they were laboring. They were working all the time, all the time, they were working so hard. Host thats, of course, one of the things about being immigrants in the United States and they were in a situation where they had visas, you had a visa to come to the United States which is a bit different than most other mexicans coming to the United States. So and they had had a successful business. What happened . What happened that made their financial circumstances change so . Yeah, it was interesting, this whenever i think we think of undocumented people we always think of people crossing the border, but the reality is that 40 of undocumented immigrants in this country never crossed the border illegally. Their visas expired. In my case, it was a tourist visa that expired, but what happened with my parents business is that they import sterling silver as i mentioned and they had a pretty a pretty good routine of getting the silver in laredo, texas and going through customs and then bringing it to san antonio and in one of those trips the silver in the van was stolen and it was probably 100,000 worth of stirling silver that was stolen on the u. S. Side of the border and they were never able to recover from that. Im always amazed at how much my parents accomplished with the resources that they had. My mom never graduated from high schoolment my dad finished high school by going to night school and so they they accomplished so much that they could, but there were some things that they probably didnt think about and so that the silver that was stolen wasnt insured so they were just unable to recover after that robbery and it wasnt for lack of trying, it was just a really difficult circumstance that they found themselves in. Host what did they do then in order to make a living. Guest so they they took out they took out a mortgage and tried to rebuild the silver business, but it just wasnt it wasnt the same. So my mom being the relentless entrepreneurial woman that she is saw an opportunity to start selling funnel cakes and start selling snow cones and all sorts of different food items at festivals in san antonio. We used to go to the festivals when we were little kids, used to take us, so he she saw an opportunity to start that business and thats what we started doing, started selling funnel cakes in san antonio. Host and you were very much a part of that, this was a Family Enterprise in terms of working when you could to help and so forth, but in the meanwhile, youre in school. Youre smart. Youre a very studious or disciplined student, and, but school is by and large a really hard experience for you. Sixth grade you mention as being one of the most terrible years of your life and you become aware of being mexican. Talk about that. Talk about that awareness and what it meant to be striving in school, how others treated you. Tell us how that felt. Guest yeah, so, i think going back to what my idea of america was, and only seeing one group of people portrayed on Television Like i wasnt part of that and that experience came back when i was learning about the Civil Rights Movement and the history that we tell in the textbooks is a very its from a perspective of a black and white narrative and so i never learned about latinos during the Civil Rights Movement and my parents never really talked to me about racism and race in america and i dont know if that was because they didnt experience it or because they thought that that i was growing up in america and learning english and i was quote, assimilating, that i wouldnt have that experience, but and learning about the Civil Rights Movement impacted me deeply and i used to cry to my dad when he picked me up from school and tell him about the atrocities that i was learning about in school, but i didnt see myself in that so i didnt think that applied to me, but, of course, in sixth grade as you mentioned, there was a kid who when i was placed in an honors math class and asked the question, why is she in the honors math class, shes a mexican and cant speak english. It took everything i had not to cry and in my broken english i said, you i dont need to learn how to speak english to do math. Math is a universal language and thats why i was always so drawn to it because two plus two is four in any language, but that experience really, even at that early age, i understood the issues that are in our culture and i realized that i may not be i may not have been talked about in the textbooks, but that it was something that i was going to experience in my life. Host yes, so thats an awareness that youre now growing into and having to deal with, but you are contending so youre contending with a lot of emotional pressures as well as the social pressures of trying to make friends and do school work, help your family and your parents with their work, but youre not really at this point very aware of immigration status or of what is to come in terms of being illegally in the country. Talk take us forward to how that came about. How did you learn that . What were the circumstances and how did you understand that at the time. Guest yeah, so i youre right that i was not aware of the immigration issues because i had really, for a long time, been able to go back and forth between mexico and the u. S. So thats what was normal to me and i thought that would be available to me always and when my visa expired at the age of 14, my mother was very reluc reluctant to talk about that and my visa having expired and once my visa being expired and unable to renew it and it was a t tourist visa and i was studying in the u. S. Ment im a 14yearold girl, i never asked to come here and here i am now having to understand that my visa is expired. My mother tells me this because i was pushing her and pushing her about planning my quincien rchr quincienra. And where are we going to mexico and have this. I knew our financial situation was changed. I dont care if its a small party i want to have this in my life and one day she blurted out that my visa had expired and on that day that she told me this, i didnt fully comprehend the enormous revelation she had made to me. I couldnt understand the way in which that one conversation was going to shape and impact the rest of my life. I couldnt have known. Host no, you couldnt have known and it plays itself out then over the subsequent years and i think in the fascinating way in which you write about it in the book, its so totally tied up with the quinciera and you said something how important it is in your culturculture and that kind of a disappointment, one cant overstate what a disappointment that would have been, but now, you have this knowledge that youre not supposed to be in this country and so, youre illegally in the country and thats the beginning of the big secret, the big secret being such a critical part then of of your experience and of your story. Help people understand just as a High School Student now why th that why that is such a complication. Guest theres a lot that goes into you realizing that youre undocumented and how much that changes your how much that changes your life. All of a sudden every decision that you make, you have to think about your immigration status and that becomes the center of every decision that you make. And you also start to feel very ashamed. I think thats the right word. I felt ashamed of being undocumented. I felt like that somehow made me less than and a lot of that had to do with the way that the issue of immigration is talked about in the media and the way that the news cover the issue. I never heard stories of undocumented people who were graduating in the top 5 of their High School Class or who were entrepreneurs and employed u. S. Citizens and those arent the stories i was hearing, it was about illegal aliens being criminals and when i looked at my parents and when i looked at myself, that narrative didnt fit me, but thats how you start to think about yourself. It does something to your psyche when someone is calling you illegal because how can you as a person be illegal . But you start to internalize all of those things and just there were so many things that to most people are just everyday things that they dont have to think about twice. A lot of my classmates, for example, were getting ready to take drivers ed and get their drivers licenses and i was always going to get questions when i was going to take drivers ed and get my drivers license. So you start having to tell these little lies so nobody finds out your truth, your secret. And so, even things like that, like not being able to get a drivers license or when all of my classmates were starting to think about college, for me, thinking about college, as much as that was instilled in me from an early age about education, is my salvation and education is going to open doors of opportunity, and my parents did Everything Possible to make sure that i had the best education that i could have, but even though i was qualified to go to any number of colleges, when the time came to apply, i was rejected from all of them because of my lack of a ninedigit Social Security number. Host yes, the way you describe the issue of applying and the blank that you had to leave for Social Security number does capture in such a specific way the things that we assume, that you and people like you could not assume, just a simple thing like being able to fill in a Social Security number. But you did excel in high school and you worked extraordinarily hard and it was against some pretty difficult personal circumstances in your home and with your parents at that point. So how did you get into college . Well, one of the biggest things that i keep going back to my parents because i i cant thank them enough for everything and for how they raised me. One of the things that my mom told me was that, there are a million things you cannot control and why focus on those things. You have to focus on the things that you can control and do your best and the rest will fall into place. And so thats what i did in college, i thought, if i dont if i dont steady study hard and im not disciplined about my school work then for sure im not going to be able to go to college or go to a great school. So i graduated in the top 5 of my High School Class and didnt know where i was going to go to college as i walked across the stage in my cap and gown at my high school dwad graduation and that was difficult because every student that graduates and walks across the stage theyll say over the loud mic where theyre going to school. Soandso is graduating, theyre attending such and such university in the fall. And when i walked across the stage it was ju